Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Poussin, Claude, and French Drawing in the Classical Age

Morgan Library & Museum

June 16 through October 15,
2017

The French refer to the seventeenth century
as the Grand Siècle, or the Great Century. Under the rule of Louis XIII and
Louis XIV, the period saw a dramatic increase in French political and military
power, the maturation of French courtly life at Versailles, and an unparalleled
flourishing of the arts. Poussin, Claude, and French Drawing in the Classical
Age, a new exhibition opening at the Morgan Library & Museum on June 16,
explores the work of some of the most celebrated artists of the time. More than
fifty drawings largely from the Morgan’s collections—including works by Claude
Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, Jacques Callot, andCharles Le Brun—will be on view.
Together they demonstrate the era’s distinctive approach to composition and subject
matter, informed by principles of rationalism, respect for the art of classical
antiquity, and by a belief in a natural world governed by divine order.

“The Grand Siècle saw artistic development
unlike any before it in France,” said Colin B. Bailey, director of the Morgan
Library & Museum. “The visual arts, literature, music, drama, and architecture
all prospered.Poussin, Claude,
and French Drawing in the Classical Age explores the extraordinary advances in
the field of drawing by some of the true masters of the period, advances that
provided the foundation for all French art that followed.”

THE EXHIBITION

I.
Courtly Style from Fontainebleau to Nancy

The Renaissance style in France
resulted from a combination of native artistic talent and artists and styles
imported from the Italian courts. With thereturn of French artists trained in
Italy, Paris became a locus for artistic activity by the 1630s. The generation
of artists working there, Simon Vouet (1590–1649) foremost among them, ushered
in a new era for French art. Having established a successful career in Rome,
Vouet was recalled to Paris by Louis XIII in 1627 and named first painter to the
king, who also engaged him to be his drawing tutor. Vouet and the king
developed an intimate relationship, as

Portrait of Louis XIII (ca. 1632–35), an
informal, frankly executed sheet indicates. Although few drawings from Vouet’s
Italian period survive, this portrait of the king made not long after the
artist’s return to France reveals the naturalism he learned in Italy and heralds
the impact that style would have on French art more generally.

The printmaker
Jacques Callot (1592–1635) spent most of his career at Cosimo de’ Medici’s
court in Florence before returning to France in 1621 to work at the court at
Nancy.

The Miracle of St. Mansuetus (ca. 1621), produced after the artist’s
return, is devoted to a local saint, Mansuetus (d. 375), who was the first Bishop
of Toul, in Lorraine (where Callot was born). It shows the saint resuscitating
King Leucorus’ son, who had drowned in the river Meuse, and is one of a series
of exploratory studies on the theme in preparation for the artist’s 1621
etching.

II. Picturing the French Court

Courts were centers where philosophy,
music, literature, and the fine arts flourished under the patronage of the
royal family and wealthy nobles. The drawn portrait was a particularly vibrant tradition
of the French court, beginning in the Renaissance and extending through the seventeenth
century. These works were collected, assembled into albums, and exchanged as
gifts. Portraiture was popular at the courts of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, and
many members of the court are recognizable even today through their drawn and printed
likenesses. Such depictions reached their apogee in the hands of masters such
as Daniel Dumonstier (1574–1646), who was renowned for entertaining his sitters
and producing flattering colored chalk portraits.

Daniel Dumonstier (1574 - 1646), Portrait
of a Gentleman of the French Court, 1628, black, red, yellow, and white chalk.
The Morgan Library & Museum; Purchased as the gift of John M. Crawford,
Jr., 1956.9.4

Portrait of a Gentleman of the
French Court (1628) is carefully annotated by the artist with the exact date,
August 31. However, Dumonstier did not identify the sitter. A possibly contemporary
inscription suggests that it depicts a M. de Porchere, but there were at least
two poets active at the court with the surname Porchere. It is Dumonstier’s
facility with combining colored chalks for a meticulous, lifelike effect in
such large scale sheets that sets him apart as a portraitist.

III. Poussin and
the Classical Ideal

Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) received his early training in
France but spent nearly his entire career in Rome, where he embraced classical
subject matter. He soon counted princes, cardinals, and a future pope among his
patrons, and his fame reached Paris. He reluctantly returned there in 1640 when
summoned by the king, although he was overwhelmed by the flurry of commissions
and the demands of royal service and returned to Rome in 1642.

As a painter, Poussin worked slowly and
deliberately. Drawings were an essential element of his thoughtful, preparatory
method. His concern for form and lighting yielded a drawing style that isbold and at times abstract, revealing his interest in overall
effect and coherence over detail. This style would prove influential on his
contemporaries in Rome, including his fellow Frenchmen Charles Mellin
(1597–1649) and Gaspard Dughet (1615–1675).

Nicolas Poussin
(1594–1665), The Holy Family on the Steps, pen and brown ink, brown wash, with
touches of gray wash, over black chalk, on paper. The Morgan Library &
Museum; Purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1909, III,71.

The Holy Family on the Steps (1646–48)
is the quintessential compositional study by Poussin for his painting by the
same name, which is in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The drawing,
which is featured in the exhibition, reveals his particular working method,
which is known from a written account of his studio practice. Poussin posed
small wax figures with linen drapery inside a box with apertures to admit light
selectively, allowing him to rigorously study the way lighting defined form.
The pyramidal structure of the figural group and architectural setting reveal both
Poussin’s debt to Renaissance models and his careful ordering of elements to
focus the composition.

IV. Claude
and the Natural World

As did Poussin, Claude Gellée, better known as Claude
Lorrain (1600–1682), would go sketching in the Roman countryside, drawing
directly from nature. He believed that the natural world was a manifestation of
the divine, and thus ordered his finished landscapes according to ideal
principles, lending them an air of arcadian perfection. Claude’s drawings
capture a range of approaches to the natural world—from stark, unadorned
observations to highly finished works of art that would appeal to courtly
tastes. Claude at least partially executed

A Hilly
Landscape, with Bare Trees
(1639–41) while he explored the area around Tivoli. With stark hills and
barren
trees, it is a striking contrast to his highly finished, idealized
landscapes. Yet, it is signed on the verso with an inscription
that can be interpreted as “Claude Roma in Urbe” (“Claude in the city of
Rome”): for all the drawing’s observation of nature, that is, the artist
seems
to have finished the work in his Roman studio.

V. Classicism and Naturalism in
Paris

Parisian interest in classical antiquity reached a peak during the middle
of the seventeenth century, and a strain of rigorous classicism became the latest
fashion in the works of artists such as Jacques Stella (1596–1657). Subjects
were chosen from antiquity and executed in a severe style reminiscent of the
formal purity of ancient art. These scenes employ the tenets of classicism: symmetry,
balance, proportion, and a seriousness of subject. The association of the early
reign of Louis XIV with the golden age of ancient Greece also marked a respect
for rational thought and philosophy.

In the 1640s, Stella produced a celebrated
series of drawings illustrating the Life of the Virgin. These compositions
reveal the qualities for which Stella was revered in his day, and which he had
imbibed from Poussin: a balanced composition, acute attention to expression,
gesture, and details of objects and costumes, and a sense of intimate
interaction among the figures.

VI.
The Rise of Print Culture

During the seventeenth century, the market for prints
flourished in France. The collecting of prints and the emergence of print
dealers, the increased publication of books, and the trend to producelarge-scale
thesis prints, all made printmaking a lucrative business.

A Protestant artist
at a time of religious persecution, Sébastien Bourdon (1616–1671) fled
Montpellier in 1622 after it was besieged by royal forces, journeying to Paris
and then Rome to seek his fortune. There, in the mid-1630s, he associated with
other foreigners, including the Dutch artist Pieter van Laer and his followers,
who were known for their scenes of peasants and beggars.

Group of Peasants and
a Boy Drinking from a Bowl (ca. 1636) served as the basis for one of Bourdon’s
earliest etchings The Young Boy Drinks (ca. 1636–7). Similar quotidian scenes
are also found in Bourdon’s paintings from this period in Rome.

VII. Le Brun and the Academic Model

Charles
Le Brun (1619–1690) enjoyed court patronage from a young age. He briefly
assisted Vouet, and then accompanied Poussin to Rome in 1642. Upon his return
in 1646 he was made first painter to the king and quickly adapted his Italianate
style to Parisian taste. By 1655, Le Brun became the leading painter in Paris,
receiving the most distinguished aristocratic commissions. Within ten years, he
was in charge of the royal collection of paintings and drawings and was the leader
of the large team that realized Louis XIV’s greatest decorative ambitions at
Versailles.

With Bourdon, Laurent
de la Hyre (1606–1656), Eustache le Sueur (1617–1655), and Philippe de Champaigne
(1602–1674), among others, Le Brun was a founding member of the Royal Academy of
Painting and Sculpture in 1648. The Academy was a formal institution under the
king’s protection, and one of its primary functions was the education of
artists. Le Brun and his busy atelier played a critical role in training the
next generation of French artists and ensuring that the practice of drawing was
central to their work. Before the young Le Brun left for Rome with Poussin in
1642, he executed

A Caryatid (1641), a design for a decorative print adorning
the theological thesis of Jean Ruzé d’Effiat, who would be
appointed the abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel that year. The grand format
necessitated several sheets of paper joined together; this exhibition marks the
first time the upper portion in the Morgan and the lower portions in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art have been reunited.

Sébastien Bourdon (1616 - 1671), Group of Peasants and a
Boy Drinking from a Bowl, ca. 1636, black and white chalk on light brown paper;
incised for transfer. The Morgan Library & Museum; Purchased as the gift of
Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 1986.59.

This exhibition is organized by Jennifer
Tonkovich, Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator in the Morgan’s Department of Drawings
and Prints, with Marco Simone Bolzoni, Moore Curatorial Fellow.